I just returned from another failed evening of trying to be a charming, single young man in New York City. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, I'm a little ashamed to say. Ashamed, because I used to make fun of a co-worker at my previous job when she woul d go to MoMA's Thursday or Friday "pay what you wish" nights. When she would tell me she was going to the museum I would say "All right! Singles Night!" And she'd get pissy, because she obviously thought of it as some kind of cultural experience not to be scoffed.

For some reason I got thinking about certain expressions which have been anomolies to me for as long as I can remember. I don't know if they've been similarly paradoxical to others, but I think I'm finally starting to see that the conflicts and confusion they represent are things which can be overcome.

The phrases I'm thinking of are things like "Choice of employment," "Choice of companion," "Choice of living arrangements," Choice of educational institution." I was very fortunate to basically take my pick of music conservatories, but for some reason the very idea of having any input into what I actually do for a living or where I live or who I spend my time with has always been dismissed by me the moment it crosses my mind. The imperative "Shutup, you're alive aren't you?" comes to mind in a perfectly i ncongruous way, because I know that those words have never been spoken to me.

I was writing a dialogue once, I would finish it if I could find it, about a guy who goes into a deli and orders a sandwich from a woman, and they engage in a rapid-fire conversation which has nothing whatsoever to do with sandwiches, but with the fact th at the man decides after a few minutes that he loves her for her sandwiches simply because she is there and she has sandwiches, and you gotta love a girl with sandwiches. But there is never really any sandwich, and they are never in love, and somehow I wa s never able to finish that little play, but I think I should. I also think I should find it, because I know it's on my computer at work, and in fact there was someone calling themself "MadMadMax" looking at me on CU-SeeMe the day I wrote it.

So tonight, I was at MoMA. There was woman there who was so beautiful I almost lost my balance. She was by herself, but as usual I quickly decided that she was far too pretty for me to put myself up to, and I also concluded that drop-dead gorgeous women s uch as the woman standing beside me in the Walt Disney Animation exhibit thought of single men such as myself as lowly outcasts, and that with a single-woman:single-man ratio in Manhattan of 3:1, anything out there must be pretty sad, and my every gesture could only be a part of my efforts to pursue something sexual, sexual, sexual.

For once, though, and I don't know why, I decided that this was no way for a man to be thinking. Beautiful people must get tired of being shunted that way, and it's impossible that they could really be thinking the way I always imagine them to be thinking . But as always, I try to be careful about extending gestures of openness or good-humor to strangers in this city, because such overtures are seemingly never trusted even in the most obvious of circumstances.

We made eye contact, and I smiled a bit, and she looked away, seeming very serious. Her eyes just made my stomach sink. As ungainly as it's always seemed to me, I find it hard to flirt because I assume that people are busy with other things, and too conce rned with the business at hand (in this case, inspecting animation cels of Pinnochio) to disrupt their affairs with unsolicited and possibly salacious confrontations. So what can a person say, I've often wondered, to sound sincere and curious, but un-lech erous? I've obviously never seriously considered the pick-up line; in any relationship I've ever had, this gentle indignity never had to surface.

She didn't head upstairs or go outside or leave the premises as it seems women always do when I clumsily try and initiate conversation. We made eye contact a second time, and then she headed upstairs. I also went up several minutes later and found her loo king over a glass case. It was a work of art which consisted of about 2-dozen dead birds wrapped in tiny wool sweaters. My first and only words to this stunningly beautiful woman were "Is that a buncha dead birds?" She replied "Yes," and moved on to the next room, retaining that posture and that presence which confirmed my natural feeling that she was more concerned with attending to the entire exhibit than chatting with strangers. I know, of course, that it's a foolish way to think, and maybe I should h ave next said "How dead do you think they are?" "You think it stinks in there?" I'd ask, pointing at the glass case.

Dead birds do not a romance make, I decided, so I abandoned possibly making another friend because I felt I'd chosen the wrong subject matter to initiate conversation. It would be complicated to develop a friendship which started over a box of dead street -pigeons. So much for Choice of Companion, at least for today. On with the romance. *

Somewhere in the circle tonight, my head filled with steak-umms and pizza and a shared laugh between two friends, one of whom is draining the grease off a slice of double-pepperoni and saturating 3 paper plates and some of the table with slick, burning ve getable-oil, while the other fellow feels safe to have purchased an egg-salad sandwich and to have relieved hisself of all thoughts concerning Charles Schultz, Johnny Carson, Luke Skywalker, Martin Luther King, and Charles Alkan before commencing the busy -clatter clacking crankling of the peppered whitebread egg-wich, sulking and oozing through his teeth and down his jaw, none of it endures the dullest gumméd champing. *

This is something that for some reason has stuck with me ever since I read it earlier this year. from UNCLE OVID'S EXERCISE BOOK, by Don Webb:

dead cat passed around for fucking by a group of adolescent boys until it got too ripe when only Charlie would fuck it earning him the tasty nickname of Maggot Dick. Seventeen years a successful law practice a BMW and his blood brothers would begin telephone calls with "Hey, Maggot." Seventeen years being well past the statute of limitations Charles decided to end the practice.

To this end Charles stole a rare copy of Almadel from his alma mater's world-famous rare book collection. Charles was an excellent student.

Charles got a Polaroid of his gang and carefully cut his won image from the picture. He placed it in a square lettered with degenerate Hebrew letters and European corruptions pf the Name -- why do you think they're called spells anyway?

He burned black roses and sulfur for a month in adoration to Beelzebub Lord of the Flies. And each night at midnight a tiny automatic projector would play the matter transmitter scene from The Fly, an old Vincent Price movie where the hero develops a fly's head and claw. Charles waited for his friends to change.

Poor Charlie, he underestimated the magic of naming. After seventeen years of being called Maggot Dick, he was like a lightning rod to the spell's electricity.

His wife killed him two days afterward with a can of Raid. *

It's something about the way he chooses "seventeen years" as his unit of time. Generically, I think people say "15 years" or "25 years" to demarcate long periods of time. "17" just has a pattern to it that I like. I'll be pleased when I can reflect on som ething meaningful that happened to me 17 years ago; at such time, I will tell as many people as possible what happened to me seventeen years ago, just for the pleasure of hearing that number. 17 years ago I was 10. In 17 years I will be 44, and what will I have accomplished? More importantly, what will I have failed to accomplish, how will I feel about my failings, and what will I be thinking when I do something to try and make up for them?

10:27 AM
IN CASE YOU THOUGHT THAT WAS ME
i was getting my mail from my post office box at rockefeller center. as usual, i stopped at a table, opened my new copy of The New Yorker and proceeded to yank out the business reply cards and other postcard-stock inserts. one at a time. as i pulled out a New Yorker subscription card and prepared to throw out the whole batch, you and i made eye contact. i think you'd been watching me the whole time, and maybe you were wondering why anyone would go to the trouble of singularly removing each and every business reply card from a new magazine. i said "hi. how ya' doin'?" you smirked a lit tle and said nothing, and i placed the business reply cards in the trash, and left. i wore a black shirt, baggy white pants, white tennis shoes. you wore a yellow dress, and had extremely long fingernails which were painted yellow.